Sunday, February 02, 2014

No shortage of headlines for Texas nutbars

-- Steve Stockman appears to have blacked out about something that happened in his life, because he has found an attorney to sue John Cornyn for lying about his (Stockman's, not Cornyn's) nights spent in jail. When he (Stockman, not Cornyn) confessed to the media to being in jail.

Rep. Steve Stockman accused a group that supports Sen. John Cornyn of lying about him, by asserting that he had been “jailed more than once” and was “charged with a felony.”

That is strange, because Stockman has admitted to these facts, several times.

“I may have been in jail a couple of times, two or three times,” he told this newspaper.

As for the felony charge, that stemmed from the time his girlfriend hid three Valium tablets in his underpants when he was reporting for a weekend in jail. “When they found that they charged me with a felony,” he told the Houston Chronicle.

Those interviews were back in 1995, during Stockman’s first two-year stint in Congress.

On Friday, Stockman, R-Clear Lake, announced that he has filed a libel lawsuit in Houston against Texans for a Conservative Majority, a political action committee funded and run by Cornyn supporters. Its website, ShadyStockman,com, includes a line from a Jan. 15, 2013, Washington Post story: “He has been jailed more than once, and was charge with a felony after one such incident when authorities found Valium in his pants.”

“The Cornyn supporters have committed libel per se against me, falsely and maliciously accusing me of a felony,” Stockman said in a statement issued by a campaign aide. “Of course, I have never been charged with or committed any such act, and these anonymous Cornyn supporters know it.”

The woman who interrupted a moderated discussion Wednesday evening between two national leaders was Kesha Rogers, a Democratic candidate for U.S. Sen. John Cornyn's seat.

Rogers caused a stir and briefly derailed a discussion between Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, co-chairs on the committee to solve the nation's debt crisis in 2010, when she began yelling from the back of the Annenberg Presidential Conference Center.

The interruption came nearly an hour into the event, when Simpson was talking to moderator Andrew Card, George W. Bush's chief of staff, about the distrust in Washington between Democrats and Republicans. The three had been discussing contributors to the national debt, such as health care and Social Security, and what would need to be cut and changed to reverse the trend.

Simpson called trust the coin of the realm, but said it had been severely tarnished, when Rogers stood up.

"No one is going to trust you guys, because you are sacrificial leaders and they're sacrificing the population," Rogers yelled. "What they're doing right now, this policy was tried at Nuremberg."

Only an hour in, and she's already gone Godwin.

Rogers, a Democrat who is running for U.S. Senate on a platform to impeach President Barack Obama and fund NASA, went on to say that Simpson and Bowles had made a mockery of the lives of Americans, which drew boos from the crowd. Several people attempted to get her to stop yelling, but she said, "They haven't answered my question." Card then acknowledged her from the stage and asked her what her question was.

"My question is why are you pushing policies that are killing people?" she asked. "Policies that Dr. Leo Alexander warned about that were tried at Nuremberg? Why are we bailing out Wall Street and you say ..."

At this point, another attendee from the audience stood up and called her a "nutcase," pointing out that President George H.W. Bush and his wife were in the room, to which she turned around and said, "I don't care."

Card attempted to get the discussion back on track when Rogers began yelling about the funds that were used to bail out Wall Street.

"Why can we not afford Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid? Why do we have to put cost effective measures on human life?" she yelled. "Why do we have to look at the office of budget management to determine who gets to live and who dies?"

Rogers left on her own several minutes later.

You know, Rogers has some good points inside that rant, but as per her usual it's in that stopped-clock-twice-a-day fashion.

She issued a press release Thursday explaining her reference to Alexander, a psychiatrist and neurologist who served as an aide to the chief counsel at the Nuremberg war crime trials. He wrote the Nuremberg Code about moral, ethical and legal guidelines after studying the actions of Nazi troops and concentration camp guards.

Rogers compared cuts to social programs, which were included in Simpson and Bowles' 2010 proposal to reduce the debt, to Alexander's warnings about physicians in Germany devaluing life.

I'm all in favor of the Simpson/BowlesCatfood Commission going off the rails, but it really needs to include Kesha lying down in front of the train. Three birds with one stone, as it were.

"Anyone pushing an amnesty bill right now should go ahead and put a 'Harry Reid for Majority Leader' bumper sticker on their car, because that will be the likely effect if Republicans refuse to listen to the American people and foolishly change the subject from Obamacare to amnesty," he said.

The Texas senator added that a bill that includes "amnesty" could keep conservative voters away from the polls.

You just gotta love it.

"Republicans are poised for an historic election this fall -- a conservative tidal wave much like 2010. The biggest thing we could do to mess that up would be if the House passed an amnesty bill -- or any bill perceived as an amnesty bill -- that demoralized voters going into November," he said. "Amnesty will ensure they stay home."